Polar bears as creatures of Fantasy have not had the widespread exposure that other animals have. I suspect this is because J. R. R. Tolkien didn’t go into the Arctic regions of Middle Earth. This is a little ironic because Tolkien had used a polar character in his Christmas letters to his children.
The first images of Fantasy polar bears in popular culture might be by Kay Nielsen who used a bear in this illustration from East of the Sun, West of the Moon (1910). Here, right from the beginning, we have a beautiful girl riding the bear, a theme that has become prominent on book covers.
Edmund Dulac’s illustration for Stories From Hans Christian Andersen (1911) came a year later. “The Snow Queen” is the story that this image belongs to. Nowadays the tale has become associated with Walt Disney’s Frozen. The animators did not choose to make any bears prominent in the cartoon.
The Father Christmas Letters by J. R. R. Tolkien didn’t see publication until 1976. The letters with the watercolor illos were done between 1920 and 1943, as a special treat for Tolkien’s children. The polar bear character is a bumbling and humorous beast but in one letter he bravely fights the goblins.
Paperback covers feature a few bears. This iconic Frank Frazetta was painted for Michael Moorcock’s The Eternal Champion novel, The Silver Warriors (1973). The novel contains the hero riding a chariot drawn by polar bears, so Moorcock may have been the first to use the idea of multiple bears pulling a vehicle. Disney again would steal the image for the White Witch in their promotion of The Lion, the Witch and Wardrobe (2005). In C. S. Lewis’s book, her sled is pulled by reindeer. (How many vans did I see this one air-brushed on in the 1970s?)
The biggest winner for Fantasy polar bears is, of course, The Golden Compass (1995) by Philip Pullman. This received a film version in 2007 that did not do well. Last year, it was remade for television to much better reception. In both cases, the polar bears of Pullman are not just sled animals but sentient beings. They are a warrior class that wear armor and live by a strict code.
The Fantasy role-playing game, Advanced Dungeons & Dragons offered a similar type of warrior bear, more humanized as they are werebears. The video game Guild Wars 2 built on this, offered their own bear warrior in the Kodan.
Other Fantasy novels have used the polar bear, often as mount.
Perhaps a more recent polar bear to get everybody’s attention was the undead polar bear in Game of Thrones episode “Beyond the Wall” (August 20, 2017). George R. R. Martin has Snow Bears, fifteen foot high monsters, in his books but it is hard to know how much of the television material was created by him and the other writers.
The plight of the polar bear is well known, with global warming destroying the ice they live upon. One day white bears may be only a creature of fantasy…
